Tere Bin Zafar: pakistani pop star and bollywood debutant ali zafar wants to relocate to mumbai. but can he

INDIA'S BEST COLLEGES, INSTITUTES and UNIVERSITIES

'Keep politics out of art and culture,' says Pakistan pop singer Ali Zafar who arrived in Mumbai this month. He would like nothing better than to move to Mumbai and become a singing actor like Kishore Kumar. But would the current milieu of hostility allow him to make that move?

'Things have to get better between the two countries,' Ali says optimistically. 'The sooner the better. Because the present hostility is unbearable. We from the entertainment industry in Pakistan are hard hit by the suspicion between the two countries.'

Ali Zafar is honest enough to admit there's more scope for him to function in India than in Pakistan. 'I'll be honest. There are more avenues and prospects here. So if the God above and the politicians down below permit, I'd love to move to Mumbai. An artiste knows no bounds and boundaries. My first home is Lahore. But I'd like to make Mumbai my second home.'

Ali has a wife and a three-month-old baby boy back home. 'When I left home I kept looking back at my home and loved ones. I wish they could come with me.' Ali expects his wife to join him in Mumbai later during his current trip to the city, his first after 26/11.

In the last 6-7 years, he has been to Mumbai at least 20 times. However, he was unable to return recently because of the current political scenario. 'Things have changed now. My last visit was before 26/11 and I remember how pleasant the mood was in Mumbai. Tere Bin Zafar I was free to move around the streets of Mumbai. I cannot deny there's tension between the two countries. Pehle aana jaana laga rehta tha. Initially, we artistes from Pakistan used to get multiple visas quite easily. Now it's different, and sadly so. However, I feel singers and other artistes should be exempt from politics.'

Ali thinks it's easy for him to incorporate singing into his acting because he uses a lot of acting expression on stage. 'I wanted to do something different from what my colleagues from Pakistan do in India. I always thought my first acting experience would be something different and special. I've no leading lady in my first film "Tere Bin Laden". I was determined that when I act for the first time I'd sing for myself and not sing for others on screen. When I met the director Abhishek Varma for "Tere Bin Laden" in Mumbai, I knew this was the project that I wanted to start my big-screen acting career with. I laughed so much when I heard the script, I was sure the audiences would love it too.'

Being married doesn't diminish Ali's popularity. 'On the contrary, female fans trust married men more than unmarried males. Married men are considered stable.'

About being inspired by Kishore Kumar, Ali Zafar shoots off, 'He's my definite inspiration. Just as Kishore Kumar saab was inspired by K.L Saigal.'

Ali Zafar is moving to Mumbai and will be signing more new movies. He adds, 'I love the city. I want it to love me back as much as I do.'

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AFTER A CALM, COMES THE...

Mahindra Retail has been a slow starter when it comes to store openings, but it has a judiciously chosen expansion strategy to take the ‘mom & me’ brand places...

The year gone by was a ghastly experience for those in the Indian retail industry. While paper calculations from the Retailers Association of India forecasted a happy 25% growth for the retail sector for the year, real growth during the year suggested a growth of just 2%! While on one hand, biggies like Reliance, Future Group, Shoppers Stop putting brakes on their aggressive expansion plans, on the other, smaller players (like Vishal Retail Ltd.) were forced to put locks on the host of existing stores. But as all heroic tales go, this one had exceptions too; rather ‘an exception’ in the name of Mahindra Retail. Many haven’t still walked into a Mom & Me store yet (that is the market name of Mahindra’s retail outlets) and many haven’t even heard about the brand (owing to its being in a very nascent stage), but for all we didn’t know, it was always working upon its strategy to remain stain-free during the bloody war against slowdown.

Spoken plainly, it was just a simple clean ‘slow and steady’ growth model to be worked upon, with no false promises of aggressive expansions. So when Reliance Retail had to put a stop to its publicly-announced penetration plan (of opening 40 stores per year), Mahindra Retail stuck to its tortoise-style plan of opening just two stores per year. Unlike the other blue-eyed of boys of India Inc., Anand Mahindra never believed in hypermarts being the stepping-stone to success in the retail world. Rather, he resorted to a specialised and unique retail format, after a two year-long homework and research, for which he hired KSA Technopak.

The group worked towards developing a USP of having a specific retail model for a specific group, judiciously avoiding the model of rolling-out a ‘me too’ brand. Walk into the office of Mahindra Retail, located at Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore, and you’d realise that for this venture, business is all about “mothers & infants” (Mahindra Retail calls it “from -9 to +9 years”), all thanks to its vision (‘To be the preferred destination, choice of every mom and child to delight them with world class product and services and to serve them in a personalized fashion’) written across a gigantic board that greets you at the entrance.

But at this very juncture, a doubt arises – identifying the mother and child space was good, for it sounded different, but when a host of analysts are found swearing to the tunes of the grocery and foods retailing symphony as an entry strategy, Mahindra’s plan to cash-in on a unique format is apparently found lost for justifications… However, a ‘never-say-die’ K. Venkataraman, MD of Mahindra Retail tells 4Ps B&M, “We didn’t want to open a regular store, without any specific target audience. Also, growth on an already claimed USP was also a strict no for us…” Surely, that’s swearing by uniqueness for real growth! But a recent research paper by market research agency, i-mint, titled, ‘Changing trends in retail marketing’, surely seems to be voicing out loud in favour of Mahindra Retail. The paper states that, “businesses need to focus nurturing a core customer base that is profitable to the company. Successful retailers generate majority of their profits from this core base.’ Therefore banking on a core group of customers (like ‘mothers and to-be mothers’ as in the case of Mahindra), surely calls for success in the mid-long term.

Mahindra’s first four stores that were opened in 2008, recorded a growth of more than 30%. And the strong logical acumen was displayed by the entity through the very fact that knowing its target customer, it only opened its shops in the metros, where, beckoning “expecting” couples is most definitely easier. But all is not good. A FICCI-based retail analyst feels that it was not really a wise bet to avoid treading down the time-tested model of retailing, at least in a country where organized part of this business, accounts for just 4.9% (equivalent to $16.5 billion) of the total retail pie.

A bird’s eye view of the entry strategy of the $6.3 billion Mahindra group proves that the entity has always sworn by the time-honored revenue generating model of foods and vegetable retailing. Its agri-business arm, Mahindra Shubhlabh Services Ltd., with its strategic partner Capespan (from South Africa), has been exporting grapes and other fruits to Europe. Therefore, it is not at all true that Mahindra is allowing opportunities offered by the mass market to fall on its blind spot. It’s agri-arm is paying heed to what is definitely counted as a sure-shot successful strategy in international markets.

Innovation in offerings is another point that makes Venkataraman and his team different. From providing guidance for vaccinations to tying up with global companies with unique agreements and launching private labels (in the initial year, the company rolled out three in-house brands and plans to roll out more such ten brands in 2010), it has many innovative arrows in its quiver. “We are also soon going to roll out services like educating the mother on proper feeding et al, and for all such services, our store staff will undergo a special and rigorous 21 day-long training sessions. And we won’t open a store unless we have a complete manpower-equipped store and have chosen a proper location,” says Venkataraman. Surely, it doesn’t believe in throwing caution to the winds, and seven stores across six cities in just two years is some proof! In this regard, there is some cause for concern, as competition is spreading quick and thick through town, and such pauses (like the one for a search for some El Dorado property) would only tantamount to sheer waste of precious time. Conclusively, by the time ‘mom & me’ gets ready to launch an aggressive growth plan sometime in the near future, a rival-chain like Mothercare (from the stable of Shopper’s Stop) would have already established heavy dominance in the market.

But, threats aside, for now, there is no denying that its bets have paid off well, with the cautions paying-off well. The very fact that a fledgling like Mahindra Retail, unlike its big branded rivals, steadily expanded its presence across all major metros without facing many problems due to the slowdown (Venkataraman confesses, “The slowdown did not affect us much.”), during a time when its seasoned competitors found their tails on fire, is some achievement in itself. A brand new year and grand plans to open 50 more new store during the year; now would you call that slow?!

Angshuman Paul

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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Online live streaming takes a leap

The Indian online-display advertising market is poised to grow at 32% this fiscal, but the road ahead is bumpy. Saurabh Bhatia, Chief Business Officer, Vdopia Inc. reveals his firm’s content to 4Ps B&M and talks about Vdopia’s 2010 game plan in India...

4Ps B&M: What was the main thought process about live streaming of cricket? Has it lead to any kind of increased patronage from your clients’ side?
SB: Working with online content owners for quite some time made us to realise the value of content in areas like cricket and news. There was also a request from our publishers for providing them a solution in those lines. That’s how the concept of live screening of cricket on board was developed as we worked with Ten Sports for India – Australia series and Nimbus for India- Sri Lanka series. Today we not only deliver an amazing reach within audience vis-à-vis television but also provide absolute measurability. We are going for an advance booking for many of the upcoming sporting events like the India – South Africa series (which starts next month).

4Ps B&M: Which are the major advertisers that have come aboard on this?
SB: For live screening we have had advertisers like Aircel, Airtel, Xerox, Maruti, IDBI, Cisco, et al.

4Ps B&M: What is the revenue sharing model of Vdopia?
SB: We associate or partner with publishers and content owners in online and mobile space. We provide free technology and essentially that technology is the ability to insert the ad within the video or in and around the video. Some of our technology is patented or proprietary which is all free of cost and in return, we generate revenues from the advertisers providing ads. These ads are then run on our publishing partner’s sites or on the video content (cricket, news, sports, entertainment, et al) and the revenue generated is shared between us and our publisher partners.

4Ps B&M: Any plans to promote live screening of news channels?
SB: Yes, absolutely. In fact, in the current quarter our core focus will be on promoting live screening across news channels. Our goal is to get all the key news channels on board vis-à-vis this particular aspect is concerned. As of now, NDTV is one of our premium publishers, thus they are among the first companies for whom we implemented live screening solutions.

4Ps B&M: But what about the Mobile ad network, especially when the talk of introducing 3G in India is so ubiquitous?
SB: One of the major initiatives for us this year is mobile. We invested significant energy and resources last year in developing mobile technology. We launched i-Vdopia in US (a mobile centric video advertising platform) and we intend to grow that platform and achieve leadership in that aspect in the current year. In addition, we are also working on project R (its code name is Project R!) which shall be revealed in the month of April. Besides this, we also intend to do a commercial launch which is another initiative both in the Internet and mobile space.

4Ps B&M: Vdopia has grown over 900% in 2009. What are your plans to sustain the same growth rate?
SB: In the short term, we believe that mobile is going to be a big initiative including live screening. We are focused on the expansion of our sales, technology, R&D in India. For 2010, we have done significant hiring and have doubled our sales team. Moving forward in the long run we are very clear that we need to continue to do innovation around video and we are absolutely committed in doing that.

As told to Neha Sareiya

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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Kyamovie, Kyamatch, Kyazoonga

Neetu Bhatia, Co-founder, Kyazoonga.com talks about her vision to make Kyazoonga.com a one-stop shop for ticketing solutions...

4Ps B&M: Online ticketing for sporting events is a novel concept in India. How did the idea click for you?
NB: It all began in the summer of 2006. When my brother and I wanted to go for a movie, we realised that there was not a single place where we could check out show timings and whether tickets were available or sold out. We checked with movie theaters to find out if their technical systems could be integrated with a single platform, and before we knew it, we were tying up with all cinema theater chains in the country. We began ticketing cricket once we received the first round of funding. We started with movies first as it is a year round phenomena whereas cricket is seasonal and it is only when team India is playing at home ground that one can see some frenzy. November 2007 was when we first sold online tickets for the India-Pakistan finals in Jaipur.

4Ps B&M: So do movie tickets net in more moolah or are cricketing events more lucrative?
NB: It depends on what we are selling – whether it is sports ticket that we are selling, is it cricket or some other sport. It depends upon the marketability and selling ability of a particular event. Our business model depends a lot upon the demographics and the city where the event is taking place. For instance, Mumbai has a very different buying culture than Delhi. While a customer pays because of the convenience he’s getting; the client pays because of the platform that we provide to sell his offering. So the business model varies for clients, events and situations.

4Ps B&M: What about competition from other ticketing portals like Bookmyshow.com? How do you convince customers to book with you instead?
NB: We’ve seen many competitors come and go in this market. There are very few companies around the world that are able to offer good centralised ticketing platform and can simplify complex problems. We’re not just selling tickets through our online channel, but also through retail stores where people can pay cash and buy tickets. And this is where we’ve differentiated ourselves from our competitors as in retail outlets, the customer does not has to worry about not having a debit or credit card like in the case of online transactions. Currently, we’ve 250 retail outlets and with the kind of strategic partnerships we are looking, we should be over 1,000 by the end of this year.

4Ps B&M: How has been the ticketing response to the recently concluded Hero Honda Cup?
NB: The response has been nothing less than phenomenal. We witnessed one of the largest stadiums in the country, in Mumbai, completely sold out, though it’s unfortunate that the rain wiped out the match. For the Mohali match, we were only selling high value tickets and we’ve seen encouraging response there too.

4Ps B&M: You had the online ticketing rights for IPL 2. Are you bidding for the 2010 Common Wealth Games?
NB: We’re the only sports ticketing company in the country. Everything and anything related to sports is always on our radar and Common Wealth Games are no exception. Our objective is to satisfy all needs of the Indian customer pertaining to sports and entertainment. We’ve recently tied up with a leading amusement park of the country and are also adding adventure sports like sailing in our portfolio. The idea is not just to provide convenient tickets but also to offer value added content to the customer so that we become a one-stop shop for them.

Surbhi Chawla

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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The real licensed Reality TV!

Despite some great original formats, licensing of Indian TV content is negligible. If Bollywood has got global acceptance, what stops home-made reality TV?

4Ps B&M: Do you think original Indian television show formats have the potential to be licensed outside India?
AP: Yes. It is the classic parallel of asking why Indian/ Bollywood films don’t crossover. Here we’re purely talking about the format or story/ characters. Indians have always been great storytellers from time immemorial; take our mythological tales, for instance. So therefore, yes, some of our shows do possess great potential to be licensed out to other countries.

4Ps B&M: … but of course, there must definitely be certain type or categories of shows that have the scope to be licensed out?
AP: Shows that have stories with universal appeal, with characters, emotions that people identify with, fit the bill. Again, certain shows could appeal in certain places, based on similarity of audience profiles, for example in Pakistan. But our soaps could even do well in a place like Brazil. Interestingly, there are times when you could find a connect even in the most unlikely places; look at Mithun & Raj Kapoor’s films becoming a hit in Russia or for that matter Rajnikant in Japan!

4Ps B&M: And how about the scope for licensing of Indian fiction shows to global markets?
AP: I believe the scope for Indian fiction shows being licensed is immense in certain global markets. However, someone needs to pick them up and market them aggressively.

4Ps B&M: Why is it that despite having some very interesting TV show formats in place, licensing them out to global markets has not yet become a regular practice in India?
AP: Well, the focus hasn’t moved sufficiently to alternative revenue streams. For example, Bollywood, in the past, focussed only on the Indian box-office. Then, with a few hits, not just within the South Asian diaspora, but amongst others across the world, they realised the potential of earning more money, and then they started chasing an ‘NRI’ and other content consumers. Same is the case with television shows… Some of it may also be a function of rights. Most cases show that the rights are taken over by the broadcaster. And a lot of them have global footprints, eg. Zee and even MTV India beam (that reaches out goes out to several markets like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, US, parts of UAE and Maldives) and Star... It is monetised through advertising/ subscriptions. But internationally, a lot of the production houses retain rights and then the format holder(s) exploits these through all other sources possible.

4Ps B&M: What needs to be done to encourage the licensing out of original Indian TV formats?
AP: Ease of registration of formats, supporting and facilitating the same through forums at Cannes are a few important steps that will encourage the licensing out of Indian shows. More so, greater consideration should be given to organising more intra-industry events, trade fairs, etc…
For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
TSI exposes b school ranking scamsters Mahesh Peri of Career 360 and Premchand Palety of C fore. - For Complete Sting Operation Video Click Here

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